Interesting Things #28 — iDevelop anywhere

Hi,

This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things, a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and random stuff.

Happy reading!

#tech

Reflections on software development from anywhere on an iPad — Here’s what I’ve learned over the months and how my baremetal homelab in the sky is setup. (hn)

TAO: Facebook’s Distributed Data Store for the Social Graph — Unlike other graph databases, TAO focuses exclusively on serving and caching a constrained set of application requests at immense scale. (hn)

Demo: Disabling JavaScript Won’t Save You from Fingerprinting — Turning off JavaScript won’t prevent your device from being uniquely identified. Find out how this is possible. (hn)

Empowering users of GPL software — It is asking the court to determine that the GPL licenses operate the way that the free-software community believes that it does. (hn)

Getting a Raspberry Pi to boot after cutting it in half — If I cut the ports off a Raspberry Pi 4 model B, will it still work? (hn)

How a Read Query Can Write to Disk: a Postgresql Story — Wait, our select query was writing to disk? Blame the low default value of work_mem. (hn)

Using the xargs command on Linux to simplify your work — The xargs command can come in very handy especially when combined with find. (hn)

#work

Stop Looking For Mentors — You can look for mentors, but that ain’t fun - so just think of a question to ask someone. (hn)

How to interview your employer — When you ask high-signal questions, you come off as more interested in them, which in turn, makes you more interesting. (hn)

Bullshit jobs and the yoke of managerial feudalism — A bullshit job is one that even the person doing it secretly believes need not, or should not, exist. (hn)

my employee wasn’t respectful enough after the company messed up her paycheck — You’re absolutely right that there’s a respect gap in this situation — but it’s from you toward your employees, not from Jane toward her employer. (hn)

#business

Profiling 25,000 S3 Buckets: The Billion Dollar Opportunity for Cloudflare R2 — Is Cloudflare properly incentivized into building a service that will endure for the long term? (hn)

What if Performance Advertising isn’t Just an Analytics Scam? — Many performance marketers will be familiar with the criticisms raised, having heard them over the years. (hn)

#science

Physics Experiment Reveals Formation of a New State of Matter – Breaks Time-Reversal Symmetry — Only in recent years has the theoretical idea of four-fermion condensates become broadly accepted. (hn)

Mesmerised brown crabs ‘attracted to’ undersea cables — Research in Scotland shows animals freeze near the electromagnetic field with implications for metabolism and migration. (hn)

Scientists discover what’s killing the bees and it’s worse than you thought — Bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. (hn)

Solar storm confirms Vikings settled in North America exactly 1,000 years ago — Analysis of wood from timber-framed buildings in Newfoundland shows Norse-built settlement 471 years before Columbus. (hn)

The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge — Today’s powerful but little-understood artificial intelligence breakthroughs echo past examples of unexpected scientific progress. (hn)

Stunning images show how muscles heal themselves after a workout — Scientists discovered a previously unknown step in the muscle repair process. (hn)

#life

Surrogacy Across Species — Scientists can now borrow the bodies of one fish species to produce another. Whether they should, though, is an open question. (hn)

People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much — Breaking up social-media companies is one way to fix them. Shutting their users up is a better one. (hn)

How Fonts Affect Learning and Memory — Research shows that fonts play a significant role in the cognitive processes that transpire while we read. (hn)

Could search engines be fostering some Dunning-Kruger? — Study shows that we think Internet searches are a sign we know more than we do. (hn)

The Dark Web has become darker and busier, cybercrime services cost less than $500 — New research highlights how the value of stolen data and general cybercriminal behavior has evolved over the past six years. (hn)

Guys Who Quit Their Jobs During ‘The Great Resignation’ on Life on the Other Side — ‘I’m happier than I’ve been in 10 years’ (hn)

It’s Never Too Late to Change — On profound realizations and taking a different path in life. (hn)

#end

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Enjoy your reading and have a good day, Beng